Wednesday, August 09, 2017

I was really pleased to see the announcement that the 2017 Massry Prize was awarded to Norm Pace, Jeffrey Gordon and Rob Knight. Alas, then someone pointed me to the web site listing past winners of the prize. Massry Prize. And I compiled the list (with some help from Wikipedia)

Massry Prize

Yet Another Mostly Male Award

YAMMA

1996 Michael Berridge

1997 Judah Folkman

1998 Mark Ptashne

1999 Gunter Blobel

2000 Leland H. Hartwell

2001 Avram Hershko

2001 Alexander Varshavsky

2002 Mario Capecchi

2002 Oliver Smithies

2003 Roger Kornberg

2003 David Allis

2003 Michael Grunstein

2004 Ada Yonath

2004 Harry Noller

2005 Andrew Fire

2004 Craig Mello

2004 David Baulcombe

2006 Akira Endo

2007 Michael Phelps

2008 Shinya Yamanaka

2008 James A. Thomson

2008 Rudolf Jaenisch

2009 Gary Ruvkun

2009 Victor Ambros

2010 Randy Schekman

2011 F. Ulrich Hartl

2011 Arthur Horwich

2012 Michael Rosbash

2012 Jeffrey C. Hall

2012 Michael W. Young

2013 Michael Sheetz

2013 James A. Spudich

2013 Ronald D. Vale

2014 Steven Rosenberg

2014 Zelig Eshhar

2014 James P. Allison

2015 Philippe Horvath

2015 Jennifer Doudna

2015 Emmanuelle Charpentier

2016 Gero Miesenböck

2016 Peter Hegemann

2016 Karl Deisseroth

2017 Rob Knight

2017 Jeff Gordon

2017 Norm Pace

42 male

3 female

I colored them based on my inference of gender. I realize that I may have some of this wrong and that using a binary system is not right in many cases but I think this certainly shows a pattern. I also realize there are many possible explanations for the imbalance here but I think it is reasonable to consider that bias against women may be a component of this.

Not sure what to do here with this information. I deeply respect the award winners here and think they are highly deserving of important science awards. But it pains me to see such a big skew in the gender balance of winners of this Massry Prize and think, sadly, that there is likely some kind of bias at work here. When there is a bias against recognizing the achievements of women it is known as the Matilda Effect. I suggest everyone involved in handing out awards such as this, and anyone reporting on such awards, should read up on it.

I note - I posted the gender ratio of winners of this award to the Gender Avenger site. See below: